By BAADASSSSS!

Drawn Together
Season Three: Uncensored!
Paramount Home Entertainment
Release Date: May 13, 2008

After South Park became a ratings success and a pop culture phenomenon, Comedy Central unlocked their war chest and began producing more original cartoon programming to capitalize on Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s crudely animated but socially and politically satirical triumph. Since their show was essentially a gaggle of construction paper characters manipulated by computers with Parker and Stone able to produce new episodes in the span of week, South Park was relatively inexpensive. But it took Comedy Central several attempts before they finally came up with an animated program that was not only remotely capable of living up to the promise of their previous success, but also wasn’t a bank breaker to produce. In late 2004 they found their solution, sort of, in the form of Drawn Together.

The brainchild of Dave Jeser and Matthew Silverstein, two former co-producers of the underrated 2003 Fox sitcom Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Drawn Together parodies reality shows like Survivor and Big Brother by focusing on the diverse group of contestants gathered together to live in a beautiful futuristic house while cameras capture every single moment of their lives. The hook is that the people living in the house are all parodies of cartoon characters from various genres with serious psychological, sexual, social, and political issues.

There’s Captain Hero (voice of Jess Harnell), a barrel-chested Superman type with the I.Q. of a five-year-old; Princess Clara (voice of Tara Strong), a right-wing, bigoted Disney heroine clone; Foxxy Love (voice of Cree Summer), a crime-solving nymphomaniac; Wooldoor Sockbat (voice of James Arnold Taylor), a happy-go-lucky Spongebob Squarepants duplicate; Spanky Ham (voice of Adam Carolla), a crass Internet toon type obsessed with the power of his flatulence; Xandir Whifflebottom (voice of Jack Plotnick), a homosexual elfin fantasy videogame hero; Ling Ling (voice of Abbey McBride), an emotionally-unstable Pokemon-like Japanese fighting creature; and Toot Braunstein (also Tara Strong), a Betty Boop lookalike 1930’s cartoon character with a variety of eating disorders and an addiction to self-mutilation.

The real forte of Drawn Together comes from its willingness to lay waste to every one of society’s sacred cows with energy, humor, and fine animation, and it is frequently very funny. Whether it be the mentally handicapped, sexuality, racism, intolerance, religion, or endless dick and bodily fluid jokes, there’s nothing the show’s writers won’t mine for comedic material. It doesn’t always work and even when it does it seems like the show’s need to constantly shock and offend comes at the expense of its characters and humor, sometimes coming across as desperation. South Park rarely has to worry about that because the show’s characters have long been established and we can easily identify with their plights even when they go over the top, which is most of the time.

But when it works Drawn Together is one of the strangest and wittiest animated shows ever made, the creators having given birth to an original alternate universe where every cartoon character has broken free from the constraints and expectations society has placed upon them and are now able to have the same flaws and strengths as average human beings. Whenever I watch this show I wonder how the show’s creators were able to portray Elmer Fudd, Pac-Man, and Snagglepuss as homosexuals, or show Pluto blowing Goofy’s head off before eating a bullet himself, without incurring the wrath of their corporate masters and opening a Pandora’s Box of litigation.

Drawn Together has had a colorful history with Comedy Central. When the show premiered in 2004 it garnered enough good notices from critics and a decent cult following over the course of its first season to justify being renewed for a second. But the show subsequently had a difficult time holding on to its viewership and the Comedy Central executives started questioning renewing the show for a third season. With the equal support of the show’s creators and fans, the brass caved and Drawn Together returned once again, but there was a catch. The show’s fourteen-episode third season was strangely split in half and the halves were aired about a year apart.

This didn’t disrupt the show’s momentum since the characters have no ongoing story arcs, but it was still jarring and an indication that the network had lost faith in the show and simply wanted to burn off their commitment to the creators so they could quickly hustle them out the door and devote their time to something more deserving … like Lil’ Bush, American Body Shop, The Naked Trucker and T-Bone Show, or Freak Show, and so on and so forth. The point being, with the exception of Lil’ Bush none of these shows were able to last half as long as Drawn Together mostly because they were ill-conceived and thus unable to build enough of an audience to stay on the air. Of course this can also be attributed to network executive arrogance and impatience, as if they expected all of Comedy Central’s new programming to live up to the standards of their biggest earners from their innovative satirical news shows to the endlessly fresh South Park in their first few episodes lest their reruns be relegated to the wasteland of the early morning timeslots following the last airings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

The biggest flaw possessed by Drawn Together is that none of the characters are particularly likeable. Since any one of them can go from cruel and vindictive to sweet and endearing with each episode, the characters only serve to act as vehicles for the writing staff’s humor. Of course this problem is typical of the majority of Comedy Central’s shows. This doesn’t make them any less humorous, but it ultimately ensures that Drawn Together will never have the staying power of the great animated comedies like The Simpsons, South Park, and yes… Family Guy.

But it’s like I said before, when it’s firing on all cylinders Drawn Together can deliver some cold and cutting social commentary nestled amidst the gross-out material. You’ll first have to dig through a myriad of pop culture references and parodies to find it. In the third season alone the show rips on the likes of Boogie Nights, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Matrix Reloaded, Good Times (all in one episode), The Terminator, American Idol, Fat Albert, Hostel, Muppet Babies, Star Wars, and Charlotte’s Web to name but a few. It’s a good thing the parodies are for the most part very funny, and at times self-referential, but they eventually wear thin.

Comedy Central DVD in association with Paramount Home Entertainment has released Drawn Together: Uncensored! Season Three in a two-disc DVD set with seven episodes on each disc. The shows are presented in full screen with English Dolby Stereo 2.0 soundtracks and no subtitles, so the cutting edge technology of the digital versatile disc has really gone out its way to replicate the experience of watching the show on your cable television beautifully. Truly stunning. At least the episodes are presented uncut and uncensored with every censored swear word and blurred animated genitalia roaming free in the wild. Now that’s letting your freak flag fly!

The extra features are slim but decent value. Four of the fourteen episodes come with audio commentaries from the show’s creators Jeser and Silverstein and several assorted creative personnel. It’s the usual rigmarole of how each episode was conceived. Not bad but then not worth a second listen either. The first disc has some promos for other Comedy Central shows available or soon to be available on DVD. The second disc offers up about eight minutes’ worth of vintage Drawn Together network promos from each of its three seasons. Nothing exciting, merely worthy of one watch before evaporating from memory. The package also mentions a feature entitled “Karaoke Sing-Along,” but I couldn’t find it on the discs. Then again I’m not exactly a karaoke fan so I wouldn’t have bothered with it since this super special feature is so special it requires a time-consuming search. The show does have some amusing songs though.

Drawn Together is a hilarious cartoon with a no-holds-barred approach to its humor that is guaranteed to offend most people who watch it unless they are open-minded and have a sense of humor. In that case they are sure to get some enjoyment out of the show. It’s worth owning on DVD, albeit at a discount, since the presentation and bonus features are far from being enough to maybe pay full price. You might want to wait for the reruns to show up on cable — just give it some time, and don’t turn the TV off after The Colbert Report, and you just might catch it one night — to see if this DVD is worth it for you.

On a final note, as I was proofreading this review I noticed I mentioned a lot of movies and television shows in reference to Drawn Together. Who says originality is a thing of the past?

Have fun. Until next time I remain”¦.BAADASSSSS!